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Last year I wrote a blog post about the Google Local Business Center (LBC). This is a directory of local businesses, and can be a great source of traffic to your website and leads for your business.

A listing in the Google LBC is a single web page that includes information about your business, such as:

Business name; address, phone number, contact details,

Business type;

Web Address

There is also a place where customers can leave reviews about your service, and you can post vouchers to give customers money off.

Results from Google LBC show up for searches on Google and on Google maps. These searches often have a place in the phrase, such as ‘florist in Southampton’. The results include a map with place-markers to show where each business is.

Since there are many people searching for local goods and services on Google, your LBC listing can be a great source of leads. The problem is that your listing has to compete with many other local businesses, which means it’s often hard to get it to appear at all.

So how do you make sure your listing appears high up the results?

Google uses many signals to determine the rank of a LBC listing. Here are my 6 tips to help you boost yours to number 1, and to grab the biggest share of that traffic.

1. Claim your listing as a business owner!

Obvious I know, but you need to claim your listing. There is a LBC listing for every business in the UK. Your LBC listing will exist even before you take ownership of it. But it won’t rank highly until you kick off your optimisation strategy. Follow the instructions in the original post to take ownership.

2. Submit your website to all the directories of local businesses.

Common ones include Yelp, Qype and the Internet Yellow Pages. Make sure you have a listing in any well known directories local to your area too.

3. Use the main keyword that you want to appear for in the title of your listing.

For example, if you are a Southampton based Florist, make sure your listing title has ‘Florist Southampton’ in it.

4. Use your main keywords in your directory description too

5. Put your directory listings in as many categories as possible

You’re often allowed up to 5. The more categories you’re listed in, the bigger the list of keywords your listing will be boosted for. Make sure the categories are relevant though – remember Google likes ‘relevance’ more than anything else.

6. Get some good reviews and ratings

Over on the webfusion blog, we covered the importance of having a ‘social media strategy‘. This includes an idea called ‘reputation management’, which is all about encouraging the development of a positive reputation.

A key way to do this is to foster good reviews of your product. There have been a few high profile cases where business owners have employed people to post positive reviews about their product in as many place as possible. This is strictly frowned upon, and can backfire on the business owner once everyone becomes aware of the scam.

It’s still possible to generate positive reviews without rigging the system. The next time a customer thanks you for your service, or sends you a positive email, ask them if they wouldn’t mind sharing that feedback elsewhere. You could even point them towards a few relevant reviews websites, and your listings on the directories we’ve mentioned here. You might know of a few local reviews and ratings sites that operate in your area too.

It’s also important to get good reviews and ratings on your Google LBC listing page. There’s a designated place for people to leave reviews – point your customers towards those.

And that’s it.

The Google Local Business Center gives you a handy one page listing that lets potential customers know all about your business. This listing can appear for local searches on both Google and Google maps. Take control of yours, boost its rank, and it can be a valuable source of leads.

Have you had any experience of the Google LBC? Leave us a comment below.

Nick Leech runs Digital Marketing Agency Euston Digital

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It’s St. George’s Day tomorrow, celebrating the Patron Saint of England. Effectively, it is England’s National Day but did you even know that 23 April is St. George’s Day?

It seems while the flag of Saint George might unite England football and rugby supporters, the country’s patron saint himself just doesn’t match up in terms of popularity to saints of the other home nations. In Wales, St. David’s Day (1 March) is celebrated with annual Parades in the main cities. In Scotland, the Scottish Parliament has made St. Andrew’s Day (30 November) a ‘voluntary Bank Holiday’. Over in Northern Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day (17 March) has been a public holiday for over a century and it is so well celebrated and renowned it has become almost an international festival.

This England Magazine has been celebrating everything English since 1968 and this week revealed that England is the least patriotic country in Europe. A survey of nearly 6,000 adults in nine European countries found that only one in three British people knew that St. George’s Day is this Friday and forty per cent didn’t know why he is the patron saint (according to legend he was a soldier in the Roman army who killed a dragon to save a princess).

So should Englishmen and women make more of the Patron Saint of England? One online group of independent campaigners have been lobbying to make St. George’s Day a Public Holiday since 2006. St. George Unofficial Bank Holiday encourage people to take the day off work as holiday to celebrate St. George’s Day . Despite signing up an array of celebrities from Ant & Dec to Amir Khan to support their campaign and attempting to get would-be MPs to do the same, another year passes without official recognition of their cause.

We are also in World Cup year when the English nation will be urged to unite behind the England national football team. Several World Cup songs are aiming to strike patriotism into the hearts of England fans beginning with St. George’s Day. 123-reg customer DJ Neil Phillips has linked with party song specialists Black Lace for the single We are the England Fans with all profits from the song going to Help for Heroes. The song is only available for download via sites like iTunes and HMVDigital and from the promotional video featured on their website and YouTube it looks like they are trying to evoke a sense of fun and celebration of England. “We chose to launch the song early in time for St George’s Day to try to get everybody to celebrate being English” says Neil.

So it may be too late this year to get behind the public holiday push but there are still a few of ways you can look to celebrate St. George – the Patron Saint of England. St. George Unofficial Bank Holiday has a guide to organised events by County. However, If you want to make your own arrangements here are a couple of ideas:

- BBC Good Food Magazine has a selection of St George’s Day recipes

- Activity Village has a collection of St. George’s Day activities from face painting guides to printable flags. Aimed at children but plenty for the big kids too.

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Any doubts as to the usefulness of social-media were set straight following the past week’s travel turmoil and the solutions offered by resourceful tweeters and Facebook users.

On Twitter, #ashtag kept the Twitter community up to date with the latest developments and potential alternative routes home, while tags like #getmehome and #roadsharing helped link like-minded people looking for a spare seat in a car, boat or train.

For those resigned to the fact that even other modes of transport looked a forlorn hope, Twitter tags like #stranded, #putmeup and #ashaccomodation have been helping those stuck overseas find somewhere to stay while in some cases also helping hoteliers or guesthouse owners fill space not taken up by guests stranded elsewhere.

On Facebook, the community spirit has been just as strong. Facebook group Carpool Europe was set up by the Swedish carpool movement with the slogan “in wait for the ash to settle, share a ride with other Europeans” and is full of wall posters looking for a ride home across the Continent. Elsewhere there are groups with smaller memberships all with the message “get me out of here”.

It was another Swede who set up the website Volcanohelp.eu as a hub for news, tweets and also hosting a forum for those looking for or offering  a temporary home. Other stranded travellers are reporting how their internet-enabled mobiles really came into their own in accessing vital information when stuck in a strange land.

With airspace re-opened, businesses are finding even more ways of offering additional customer service via new media. The official Twitter channel for O2 in the UK @o2 was reporting earlier today that they were “texting all O2 customers stuck abroad to tell them how to call most airlines for free”, and letting others know about it by using #ashtag and #getmehome tags in their tweets.

So while we may not have had the usual visible air-traffic in the UK skies in recent days, the virtual skies have been busier than ever. With the “Dunkirk-spirit” being cited by media outlets in recent days we may well be recalling in years to come that when the ash came, new media stepped up to the plate and excelled.

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Real time search results, that show what people are saying ‘right now’ on the ‘live web’, has been a battle ground for search engines in the last 12 months.

The battle has been stoked by Twitter, whose platform has made the whole concept possible.

Google and Bing moved quickly in 2009 to surface results from the latest news, blogs and reviews, and both ended up doing a deal with Twitter to feature Tweets in the Search Engine Results Pages.

Real time didn’t live up to the hype

Once the Twitter Integration went live on Google, tweets to and from brand owners (like 123-reg) started to appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for brand searches. The reaction to this change was mixed. To users, it wasn’t always useful to see what brand owners were talking about on Twitter – it distracted them from simply navigating to the brand’s website. And for brand owners, it was a potential hazard – Twitter conversations aren’t ones you necessarily want to air to newcomers.

Drawing attention to an eye-tracking study from oneupweb, the Guardian said that users started to ignore the content.

It seems that Google in particular found it very difficult to decide which Tweets were important, and flooded its own results with fairly useless information.

Twitter is trousering significant revenues from the deal. Until their own advertising platform takes off, they’re going to want it to succeed.

After a few days of Twitter results appearing high in the SERPs they almost all disappeared, and now its not easy to find them at all.

Something that needs more discussion

This was a topic covered at Search Marketing Expo SMX West in California. The major search engines said they were continuing to try and work out which queries to show results for, who’s Tweets were important to show, how to work out what was relevant, and how to get rid of spam.

Enter some new players

To try and answer these questions there are three search engine start-ups, who might just be able to show where ‘real-time’ can add value.

CrowdEye.com: This search engine just features Tweets, and uses a ‘CrowdRank’ algorithm to decide which are the most relevant Tweets and links. Users can filter the results by time, and shows hourly tweet volume in the last three days.

Collecta.com: Allows you filter by many different things, including photos, blog posts, blog comments, videos and status updates,

Topsy.com: Applies ideas from both the above, allowing users to filter by source (photo, web, tweets) and by time and relevance.  It lets you look a lot further back than the last three days too.

Real time search hasn’t been worked out yet, but these start-ups seem to be making a better fist of it than Google and Bing.

Is real time search here to stay? Is it useful? Leave us a comment below.

Nick Leech runs Digital Marketing Agency Euston Digital

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After a little episode we went through in 2008, we can speak with some authority on the subject of having your website hacked. It’s not a pleasant experience – yet as more people build websites and get online, it’s not as uncommon as you’d hope.

Websites get hacked for lots of reasons. The stereotype is of teenagers messing around in their spare time, but actually, lots of sites are hacked automatically, by online programs called scripts which target sites built using particular technologies.

This is done for commercial reasons. The hacking scripts insert links into your site or point your domain name to other places.

Those links redirect visitors to other websites – often ones peddling dodgy pharmaceutical products or bristling with spyware. The hackers make money. You lose out.

At the very least, getting hacked can cause you no end of hassle. At the worst, restoring your site and repairing your reputation can cost you quite a bit of money.

Which sites are vulnerable?

Websites built using blogging or content management tools like WordPress or Joomla can be more vulnerable than sites coded from scratch. This isn’t because those tools are inherently unsafe, but simply because lots of people use them.

Hackers know that if they find a security hole in WordPress, they’ll be able to use it to hack thousands of WordPress-based sites. The payoff from the effort is higher than if they’d spent the time figuring out how to hack a single, custom-built website.

How to protect yourself

Hold on, don’t start to panic! Thousands of big names use sites built with these common applications. Number 10, TechCrunch and eBay wouldn’t use WordPress if they didn’t think it was safe. Read the rest of this entry »

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In a world where technology rules and the realism of ‘reality’ even comes under question, surely nothing can ever surprise us?

Well, what about a console game that has competitors doing battle in a concept based around top search engine results?

Perhaps, least surprising is that the Wii console game due for release at the end of the month is to be released to Japanese Wii owners initially. The game, And-Kensaku (Kensaku meaning ‘searching’ in Japanese), sees players competing by guessing popular web search terms. The player with the most correct guesses wins. Using the familiar mini-games set-up, players are rated according to their ‘hit-count’.

The game is a collaboration between Google, Nintendo and developer Shift and uses Google’s search engine to potentially keep the game in-date for eternity and make every game different. Up to four players can play simultaneously and there is an off-line option with 10,000 pre-stored words and phrases but the online version looks a great twist on the family-quiz type game using current Google search trends – a kind of Buzz meets Family Fortunes.

There are no immediate plans to release the game outside Japan but don’t be surprised if you see a version hitting UK shelves ahead of the Christmas shopping rush and potentially creating a new generation of SEO experts.

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It’s that time of year again and here at 123-reg we don’t want you to end up looking a fool.

So we’ve trawled the web and found some of the top April Fool’s spoofs out there this year so 1) you can marvel at their inventiveness and 2) make sure you don’t get caught out.

Google UK translate for animals

Google’s business slogan is “Making the world’s information universally accessible” and hot on the heels of their assistance in overcoming business and social barriers comes this latest effort overcoming barriers between species – or so they say. “We are excited to introduce Translate for Animals, an Android application which we hope will allow us to better understand our animal friends. We’ve always been a pet-friendly company at Google, and we hope that Translate for Animals encourages greater interaction and understanding between animal and human.” expands the Google blurb on what we think must be a spoof? Surely?

YouTube’s text-only mode

“By using text-only mode, you are saving YouTube $1 a second in bandwidth costs” claims the online video site, where you can watch a sample video in  a low-resolution with lots of miscellaneous characters replacing the usual pixels. We think the “fool” at the end of the URL might give this one away.

Starbucks new range of cup sizes for our North American cousins

Out in the US and Canada they say big is better so the coffee-house giant leads its blog with a story of two new cup sizes coming soon, thanks to direct customer feedback. The Plenta is for those who need more than just a little caffeine kick. At a whacking 128 US fluid ounces (3.785 litres!) the Plenta would probably take a whole day to finish. While big is big across the Atlantic, so is keeping weight-down, so the size-conscious might be attracted to the Micra cup size at just 2 US fluid ounces (59 millilitres). That is if they ever existed…

For a fuller list of April Fools spoofs this year and past, check out April Fools Day on The Web

Not only do we at 123-reg like saving you from looking a fool but we also like giving you a little bit of a treat every now and then. Follow us on Twitter now to check out our very special April Fool’s Day offer.

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Starting a new design can be a very daunting prospect. There you are, sat in front of a blank Photoshop or Fireworks canvas, knowing that your client wants something fresh, unique and professional. Of course, you don’t want to give them anything less. But the clock is always ticking away in the background.

It’s common for web designers to feel a little anxious when starting a new project. After all, developing a solid design (that will meet the client’s brief) will inevitably involve several false starts. And with time ebbing away, the last thing you need is a ‘designer’s block’.

So how do you ignite that all-important inspirational spark? The traditional approach would be to research the competition to see how they are presenting the message that you are designing for. This will be one of the most important stages of your preparation.

Also, have a look at various web galleries and draw some inspiration from your contemporaries. Sites such as thefwa.com and bestwebgallery.com can really get you thinking outside of the box!

And why not venture away from your PC to have a think about nature, animals, people, places, shapes, buildings, products, cities, music and whatever else floats your creative boat. By drawing on non-design inspirations, your mind will open up to new, invigorating perspectives.

Do you have any particular ways in which you like to kick-start your design process? Then why not share them with our readers?

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